The long-standing plan to capture and take his pleasure with Black Ear’s younger daughter had grown from a spark to a full flame within the depraved being of Wilfred Brody. He’d turned his man-hunting skills toward the finding of the young lady, and in the process learned something intriguing: the former gang members of Black Ear Skinner had scattered upon their leader’s death, but now were beginning to move. All in the same direction, like a parade of bad men. Yet not exactly a parade, but more of a convergence. Something, or someone, was drawing them to a particular little spot in Texas. A remote, dusty smattering of adobe and wood and stone called Hangtree, famous only for its mass execution of renegade deserters during the Mexican-American War.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Heller adjusted his field glasses and looked closely at the cattle in the rope corral nearest him. He was almost entirely certain that the brand he could barely make out over the distance was in fact his. He swept the glasses to the right and found a view of one of the men on horseback just outside the corral. He focused in and held the glasses steady, but the man was a stranger.
A rustling operation? Surely so, but Heller couldn’t quite put together why it was being done in the way it was. The cattle were crowded together to an unreasonable degree, as if about to be herded onto cattle cars. But no railroad ran here.
Moving his field of view about some, he found another man on horseback, facing roughly in his direction. Heller adjusted the glasses and suddenly drew in his breath. On the back of the horse was a man with the same face as that which looked out in blind portraiture from the front corner of the Dog Star Saloon. Toleen!
This, of course, could not be the same man. It had to be his twin. If Julia had been right in identifying the dead one as Cal Toleen, that had to be Cal’s twin brother, Drew, out there on horseback. Drew Toleen, killer, rapist, highwayman, cattle thief, bank robber.
Bank robber.
Heller put down the field glasses and thought hard. A memory of an old notion he’d developed when first getting to know the town of Hangtree came back to him. The flimsy nature of many of the buildings, mostly a mix of adobe and frame structures, had struck him. A good storm, a cyclone, a tremor of the earth, even a concentrated stampede . . . any of those things, it appeared, would have the potential to flatten Hangtree like a finger-flicked house of cards. It was easy to imagine the chaos and vulnerability that would result.
Especially if the last scenario was in play: a concentrated and even directed stampede. Waves of heavy bovine bodies surging and trampling and crashing . . . if it was fast enough and intense enough, the town could be brought down and its humanity driven into what cellars and surviving shelters remained.
At times, just for his own entertainment, Heller had toyed around with trying to figure out how, if he were criminally inclined, he might go about using a massive stampede as a cover for crime in Hangtree. With many hundreds of cattle devastating the town, why, a man could get away with murder, arson, robbery. Most of all, robbery.
Even a bank robbery.
He studied the scene before him and rubbed his chin, thinking and trying to put pieces together. It all seemed ludicrous and far-fetched . . . but far-fetched things were happening in Hangtree County lately, and obviously something unusual was going on.
On the remote chance that someone was actually setting up a bank robbery, Heller stood to lose a lot. No one would suffer more from a clean-out of the bank than would he.
Even without that, even if there was no stampede and no robbery, Heller and his fortune were in an imperiled situation here. His eye moved over to the abandoned ruin of the church where a crazed preacher had once declared the Confederacy would be magically reborn through the hand of God himself. He drew in a long, deep breath, and let it out slow.
There was a cellar beneath that ruined church. A cellar nearly inaccessible because of rubble that had collapsed into it. Nearly inaccessible, but not fully so. Someone who knew the way in, or even had the patience to explore until that way was ferreted out . . . that person or group of persons could put their hands on something Sam Heller himself had hidden away beneath that church years before. Something worth digging for.
Thousands of dollars in gold and silver. A buried treasure, not from some bandit or pirate’s lost fortune, but the product of Sam Heller’s hard and diligent work over a period of years.
Most of Sam’s fortune was locked away in the Hangtree Bank, just like Arvil Caldwell liked it. But Heller had never been a man much trustful of overly formalized institutions. He believed much in the institution of law, but even there trusted the general principles of equity and the application of commonsense fairness and justice above the strictures of strict legalism. Heller had declined to assume that bankers in suits and vaults with heavy doors were necessarily the best way to keep a man’s money safe. The problem was that everyone knew that banks were full of money, and that the money was locked up. And that locks could be opened and vaults emptied.
Heller looked at the church ruins through his field glasses and was pleased to see there was no evidence that anyone was poking around there just now, or that rubble had been shifted or removed. Whatever was going on at least had nothing to do with digging around beneath that church. He was mighty glad of it.
Heller crabbed backward until it was safe to stand without fear of being seen. He went to his hobbled horse and mounted, heading back to Hangtree.
So Johnny Cross had told him the truth when he described the goings-on out here at the ghost town. Might he also have been telling the truth about Julia actually being daughter to Black Ear Skinner?
And if she was, might the fact Della Rose Skinner was in Hangtree County account for the fact that old Black Ear stalwarts such as the Toleen brothers were here, too? Was she here because of them, or were they here because of her? Or was it mere coincidence?
Heller tilted back his hat and looked up past the brim to the sky. “Lord, you’re going to have to help me figure this one out. Because right now I’m mighty, mighty perplexed, and I ain’t going to deny it.”
He rode on toward town, thoughtful and receiving no answers from either his own tumbling mind or the Lord above.
Jumbled items, a disheveled display, and a missing shop girl who had shown no prior evidence of unreliability. Those were the realities that initially disturbed Myrtle Bewley when she got back from her errand-running and found the dress shop open but empty.
What had Johnny Cross disturbed, though, was the combination of those same facts with the blood on the corner of a display table, with a little more pooled beneath it on the floor, drops leading back through the shop and out the door. Someone had injured himself or herself on that table, then had walked out through the shop’s rear entrance.
Or been carried out.
Myrtle was distraught. “Oh, if something has happened to her because I left her alone here, I’ll never forgive myself for it! Never! Such a sweet girl, and so pretty! If I’d had a daughter, I’d want her to be exactly like—”
“Try to calm down, Myrtle,” Cross cut in. “We don’t know yet what happened. Could have been a customer who fell and hurt themselves, and Della . . . Julia, I mean, maybe helped them out so they could get tended by the doc and didn’t have a chance to close up. If that’s the case, we’ll know soon. Right now Clifton Smalls is out looking for the doctor to see if he’s tending anybody with injuries that might match up with somebody falling against the corner of a tabletop.”
“What if . . . what if she’s . . .”
“If she, or anybody else who got hurt here, was dead, then they’d likely be lying either in the shop or out back somewhere, and there’s no corpses about that I can see.”
“No, but there’s blood. It’s the blood . . . It bothers me to see it . . .”
“I don’t blame you for that, Myrtle. I don’t like seeing it either. I hope just as much as you do that she’s not hurt. Or nobody else either.” He touched a fingertip to the blood on the edge of the tabletop. “Of
course, it’s pretty obvious that somebody is hurt.”
Myrtle let out a wild wail, loud enough to hurt Cross’s ears. He poked a fingertip into his nearer ear and jiggled it about, trying to reduce the ringing.
“I’m so sorry,” Myrtle said. “I’m just so upset by this!”
“I have a suggestion,” Johnny said. “Let’s turn the sign over to say ‘Closed,’ and you get out of here for today. I’ll make sure this blood gets cleaned up, and as soon as we get the good news that Della . . . Julia . . . is fine, I’ll let you know right away.”
“Why do you keep calling her by the wrong name?” Myrtle asked.
“I’m just loco, I reckon,” Cross said, shrugging. “I had a dog name of Caleb when I was a boy, and once I called him Charlie for a day and a half. No reason for it. Just couldn’t remember it right. Like I said, loco.”
Cross’s suggestion about closing shop was well-taken, and the act was done forthwith. Making Cross promise three times to run to give her news the instant it was received, Myrtle Bewley headed home, refusing to answer the queries of those who passed her and asked why she was crying. Once home she threw herself onto her big bed and sobbed until at last she fell asleep.
He was found behind the livery stable with a pitchfork thrust completely through his chest, the prongs coming out between his shoulder blades and pinning him to the earth like a bug in a schoolboy’s classroom insect display.
No one knew him, but two or three people said they’d seen the man on the street, loitering about for the last two or three days, sometimes seeming to watch the dress shop and sometimes near the boardinghouse. “Some filthy fellow with wicked designs on that pretty shop girl, I’ll betcha,” said old Willie Walker, who had been leading the singing in the Hangtree Church the day that same and then-future “shop girl” had deprived a would-be thief of his teeth. “He dragged her out here and tried to have his way with her, and she got hold of that pitchfork and . . .” He grinned and nodded while making a jabbing motion, seemingly liking the violent vision running through his mind just then.
Sheriff Mack Barton had no better theories of his own, and so nodded at the old man. “Very well could be what happened, Willie. Could be. But you didn’t actually see any of this yourself, right?”
“That’s right. But I tell you, Sheriff, I’d be glad to testify to it in court all the same, ’cause that’s pretty much the way it had to happen.”
“I’m afraid it don’t work that way, Willie. You can only testify to what you see.”
The old man tapped the side of his head. “I can see it clear as a bell up here,” he said.
“I’ll let you know if we need you, then,” Barton said. “Until then, keep a look out for that young woman. We found signs of a struggle over in the dress shop, and some blood on the corner of a table.”
Willie Walker took that in and was troubled. He nodded grimly and shuffled off.
Deputy Clifton Smalls stepped up beside Barton and looked down at the corpse. “Reckon who he is?” he asked.
“I don’t think he’s going to be able to tell us,” the sheriff replied.
“Like as not,” said Smalls, nudging the corpse with his boot toe. “Like as not.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
She didn’t know where she was or how she’d gotten here. The ceiling above her, the walls around her, the bed on which she lay, the cheap picture of a very Gentile Jesus hanging beside the bed . . . none of it was familiar. All she knew was she had awakened here, that the bed was comfortable, and her head hurt badly.
Lying in silence, sometimes hearing what might be the movement of someone elsewhere in this unknown house, Della Rose Skinner could remember only one time her head had throbbed so badly. She’d been riding with her father across Georgia pastureland, one of those rare days when the law had been compensated to look the other way and he wasn’t being forced to hide so much as usual. She’d taken a spill when she’d unwisely tried to follow her father’s instruction and example in jumping a rail fence. The fence wasn’t particularly high, but Della was no good horseman at that age, and the horse had lost footing when it came down on the far side of the fence. Della Rose had been thrown from the saddle and banged her head on a stone. She’d awakened to find her father kneeling beside her, his mangled black ear even blacker for being silhouetted against the sky. He’d stroked her brow gently and told her that when it came to doing what he told her to, like jumping a horse before it, or she, were ready, it would be best if she exercised some restraint and common sense. He was not a good man for providing examples and instruction, he told her.
Thinking back on that old memory seemed to clear the way for more immediate remembrances to return. She recalled being surprised in the dress shop by a stranger who knew who she really was and made the extraordinary claim that he had been sent by Della Rose’s own mother, purportedly newly awakened from her long coma, and that she should come with him and go home again to see the woman who had not laid eyes on her beloved daughter since she was a growing little girl.
There had been argument, resistance, struggle, and somehow she had fallen and hit her head on something in the shop. After that it was all a murk. A sense of being carried like a dead thing, of hearing the man who had her talking as if to himself, but talking about her, and saying things that filled her with dread and an understanding of his true reasons for seeking her out. She recalled being dumped on her back on the ground, her head hurting like all torture as the back of it slammed the hard earth, then her clothing being tugged at and the man laughing and sneering above her, telling her his intentions. His hands had groped and pushed and pressed, and she had been unable to fight them off . . .
Then suddenly he was gone, snatched away as if some great eagle had swept down from the sky and picked him up in its talons and carried him off. She’d passed out a few moments, then came groggily around to find a fight under way, her captor struggling with a man who seemed familiar but whom she could not immediately place. Whoever he was, he was her hero at that moment.
She’d moved a little, thinking of trying to sit up, when she’d spotted the pitchfork. It leaned against the horizontal boards making up the side of a barn or stable stall—it was then she recognized she was in the Hangtree livery stable—and she pulled herself toward it and used it to pull herself creakingly to her feet, where she wobbled a few moments while using the pitchfork as a crutch, its prongs rooted in the dirt of the livery floor. The fight went on, about ten or twelve feet from her. Her impression was that the fighting men were so engrossed in their combat that they did not even notice she had managed to stand.
So dizzy, so wobbly . . . she felt at that time as if she might never stand up easily again. Reaching up with her left hand, she touched the part of her head that hurt most and found broken skin and scabbing blood. She’d seen the open livery door and felt the urge to flee to the street and find help . . . but she knew she could not flee if she could not even keep her own footing. Then one of the fighters nearby yelled in pain and she managed to turn and look.
The man who had captured her had gotten the arm of her would-be rescuer in his grip and was twisting it so severely she was sure the bone would snap and poke right out through his flesh. She looked at the man’s face and suddenly remembered where she’d seen him before.
He’d been behind the pulpit the day she had made herself locally famous with the help of a heavy wooden collection plate in the Hangtree Church. It was the preacher himself, the Reverend Fulton, if memory served correctly regarding his name, and obviously he’d seen her being carried into the livery by her captor and had been brave enough to react.
Fulton was a heavier man than the one he was fighting, the supposed Wilfred Brody, but Brody possessed more skill and youth. Fulton was taking the worst of it. Della saw that if the scenario didn’t change, Brody would prevail, Fulton would be hurt or killed, and she would be in just as bad a captive position as before.
But there was no one to help. No one but she, and she was
so woozy as to hardly be able to move, much less fight.
A horrible, muffled splintering noise, and a new scream of suffering from Fulton, told her that the preacher’s arm was indeed fracturing.
From somewhere inside, a rage beyond anything she had ever felt had surged in Della Rose. Ignoring dizziness and wavering vision, she had raised the pitchfork and half-ran, half-staggered at the combatants. For a fraction of a moment Fulton’s pain-filled eyes had met hers and she could tell he understood what she was doing. He’d exerted in one last burst of effort and managed to save his arm from further damage, but more importantly, to throw Brody off-balance and make him lose his grip on the fighting preacher.
When Brody stumbled a little, the opportunity came and she seized it without thought, hesitation, or any specific plan. Brody fell back against one of the support uprights that reached from the dirt floor to the base of the loft above. His arms flailed reflexively to the side, leaving his chest open and unprotected. Della stabbed with the pitchfork and struck home, though only penetrating a couple of inches. The pain of it was sufficient to drop Brody to his knees, though, giving Fulton time to break fully away from him, stumbling off while gripping and gingerly rubbing his twisted arm.
Della pulled the pitchfork back and then stabbed forward again, much harder. Brody’s eyes had their death-glaze even as he was driven backward, his shoulders winding up between his own heels and the pitchfork pinning him to the ground. Della heard his hips popping out of joint even as he died, his hands moving in circles in the air above him, then flopping down and lying still at his sides.
Fulton, recovering some, came to the dead man and looked down on him. “Who was he?” he asked Della.
“He was a man who said he was paid to come and find me and take me home to my mother, who has been in a coma for years, to tell me she had awakened and had sent him to find me and bring me home to her.”
Savage Texas: The Stampeders Page 13